The History of the Chair
Of all furniture pieces, the chair might be primary. While the majority of other items (apart from the bed) are created to support objects, the chair supports the human form. The term chair is meant to be viewed here in the larger sense, from stool to throne to complex makes such as a bench and sofa, which should be viewed as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not evidently definitive.
The social history of the chair is as curious as its history as art and craft. The chair is not simply a physical support or aesthetic piece of art; it was also an indicator of social ranking. Within the past royal courts there were important differences between being seated on a chair with arms, or a chair with a back but without arms, or worse having to squat on a stool. From the past century, the director’s and/or manager’s chair has been seen as a signifier of superior position, like in democratic government meeting the speaker sits on a raised platform.
In its furniture form, the chair encompasses a range of various models. There are chairs created to attend to man’s age and physical abilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and for his rank in society (the executive chair, the throne). From historical times there were chairs used for birthing (birth chairs); from the 20th century, there have been chairs to die in (the electric chair). We design chairs with one, two, three, and four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. There are chairs that can be folded up, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Modern day living has demanded special chairs in automobiles and aircraft. All these chair shapes has been evolved to suit to growing human desires. For its unique relationship with man, the chair appears to its full advantage only when utilised. Although it doesn’t make a difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a chest of drawers whether there are things inside or not, a chair is really seen best and fairly regarded by a person utilising it, because chair and sitter require the other. Thus the individual limbs of a chair were named according to the limbs of our human form: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the primary role of your chair is to support your body, its value is judged basically for how fully it does fulfill this practical purpose. In the manufacture of a chair, the maker is restricted in certain static law and principal measurements. In these regulations, however, the chair maker has great freedom.
The history of the chair covers an era of several thousand years. There were peoples that had made significant chair forms, expressions of the principal object in the spheres of technique and design. Within such societies, particular note needs to be made of ancient Egypt and Greece; China; Spain and The Netherlands in the 17th century; England in the 18th century; and France in the 18th century during the lives of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the items of masterful scheme, are known from tomb discoveries. One of the two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The typical Egyptian chair would have had four legs designed as akin to those of some animal, a curved seat, and leading to a sloping back supported over vertical stretchers. From this design a durable triangular design was obtained. There was from our understanding no noteworthy difference between the creation of Egyptian thrones and chairs for common populace. The general difference lied in the decorative ornamentation, in the choice of more valuable inlays. The Egyptian folding stool most probably was made for an easily carried seat for army officers. As a camp stool this kind persisted for much later periods of time. But the stool also then was made as the purpose of a ceremonial seat, its original role as a folding stool ignored or forgotten. This can from today be seen, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, formed in ebony with ivory inlay work and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are made in the form of folding stools but cannot be folded as the seats are worked with wood. The simple make of the folding stool, being of two frames that spin on metal bolts and support a seat of leather or fabric held between them, then appeared some time later from the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The best known of this form is the folding stool, of ashwood, now seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The significant Greek chair, the klismos, is known not in any ancient item still extant but in a wealth of pictorial items. The significant kind is the klismos posited on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial ground in outer Athens (c. 410 BC). This is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of those are shown. These unusual legs were thought to have been created in bent wood and were likely to have been had extreme pressure with the weight of the sitter. The joints fastening the legs to the frame of the seat had to be therefore super solid and were visibly pointed out.
The Romans borrowed from the Greek designs; designs of casts of seated Romans are designs of a denser and apparently slightly less delicately constructed klismos. Both features, the light or heavy, were revived as part of the Classicist era. The klismos style is known in French Empire styles, in English Regency, and in some brands of notable originality around Denmark and Sweden around 1800.
China
The ancestry of the chair in China isn’t able to be traced as far back as chairs in Egypt and Greece. From the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unbroken series of drawings and paintings has been protected, showing the interiors and exterior of Chinese buildings and the designs of furniture. Preserved also of the 16th century are a number of chairs crafted from wood or lacquered wood, that hold an astonishing familiarity to designs of previous chairs.
As in Egypt, there were two fundamental chair forms in China: a chair having four legs and a folding stool. The four-legged chair was found both with or without arms but always having its square seat and straight stiles (upright side supports) to hold up the back. In one form, however, the stiles had been delicately curved on top of the arms for the purpose of sit right with the form of the S-shaped back splat (the central upright of its chairback). Together, the three sections had been mortised onto the yoke-like top rail. Though the idea of the Chinese back splat later had an introduction for English chairs from the Queen Anne period, wooden members that would merely to a particular capability support corner joints (as well as being loose in the bargain) represent a feature particular to Chinese chairs. The four legs pass through the seat frame, which closes over the rounded staves. Each member is round in section or possesses rounded edges—a left over as may be to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not comfortable and occasionally had a plaited texture. These chairs required of the sitter to remain stiff and upright; for when too much pressure is pushed on the back, the chair has a habit of collapsing. In patriarchal Chinese households of this period armchairs probably were allowed only for the senior members of the family, for they were respected greatly.
The Chinese folding stool is believed to have travelled to China from the West. It is akin very much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a difference in that the top rail is elegantly fixed to the two legs of the stool by means of a curved member, which is more often than not possessing metal mounts. From a Western perspective the resultant effect of both these furniture items is stylized. The manufacture and aesthetic parts are combined in a way that is both naïve and refined. The patchwork appearance is an upshot of the fact that the individual items do not appear to have been adjoined with either glue or screws, but were mortised into one another and locked into place in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain of the 17th century also left its signature on the chair. Artworks show a kind of chair with a relatively crude wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, consisting of two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in between the layers, stitched to bring out a pattern of tiny pads. The front board and a related board from the back could be folded after loosening some small iron hooks. In this way the chair was an easily portable piece of furniture in traveling which, at the same era, had the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered design of chair can be seen in engravings of the interior of rich Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, as well as in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. While this design of chair might also be seen in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won critical acclaim, it is not believed that the design actually originated in The Netherlands. Generally, the legs of the chair were smooth, round in section, and of slender shape; they are occasionally baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is clearly a bourgeois piece of furniture and was crafted in vast numbers, as can be surmised from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is an entire row of those chairs lined up against a wall. The design asserts itself by virtue of its elegant proportions and delicate upholstery in gilt leather or fabric framed with fringes.
France and England: 17th and 18th centuries
The French Rococo chair in its most mature of forms—that was, as created in Paris around 1750—disseminated over most of Europe and was imitated or copied into the mid-20th century. The style owes such popularity to a combination of leisure and elegance. The seat conforms to the human body and allows a relaxed sitting position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Generally the seat and back are upholstered, and there are small upholstered pads over the armrests. Smooth transitions made between seat frame, legs, and back conceal all the joints, which are strongly constructed on craftsmanlike principles in spite of the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of them use wood of rather thick measurements; but all members are deeply molded, all superfluous wood has been removed, and more expensive examples would be further embellished with intricately delicate and decorative engravings. The wood may be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry should be used for all of the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; cane is occasionally used instead of upholstery.
English chairs of the 18th century were more variable in form than the French. The French taste for stylistic uniformity, which disseminated from the royal circles in Paris and Versailles over most of France and was popularised in large parts of the Continent, had no parallel in England. Prior to 1740, the most commonly used wood was walnut; thereafter, and for the rest of the century, it was mahogany. Walnut, though beautiful in hue, was soft and therefore less suited to wood carving than to rounded, curving forms. Outer surfaces, such as the back and seat frame, were usually veneered. During the walnut period, highly overstuffed armchairs, covered with leather or embroidered material, were also developed. The best upholstery of this period is precisely and firmly modelled and accentuated by braiding or tacks. When imports of mahogany became common, no specifically new chair designs appeared, but the character of the woodwork changed. Mahogany, having a firmer, closer grain, could be cut thinner, which meant that individual parts of the chair could be more slender in shape. Mahogany also lent itself better to carving than walnut. Carving was concentrated more on the arms and back than on the legs, which as a rule were straight and smooth with chamfered (bevelled) edges and molding. There was a wealth of variety in chairback designs, featuring elegant, pierced, vase-shaped splats or two upright posts connected by horizontal slats (ladderback).
Alongside the French Rococo chair and the best English chairs in walnut and mahogany, the stick-back chair was relatively unaffected by the stylistic changes of the day. Originally a medieval form, known, for example, from paintings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder and still found in mid-20th century in the churches and inns of southern Europe, the stick-back chair (in all of its variations) consists basically of a solid, saddle-shaped seat into which the legs, back staves, and possibly the armrests are directly mortised. This typically peasant form underwent a renewal and a process of refinement in England and America during the 18th century. Under the name Windsor chair (a term that seems to have been used for the first time in 1731) or Philadelphia chair, it became commonly known and was widely distributed throughout the world.
Late 18th to 20th century
During the Neoclassical period, no basic changes took place in chair forms, but legs became straight and dimensions lighter. Backs in the shape of classical vases replaced the fanciful outlines of the Rococo period. Around 1800, freely executed imitations of Greek and Roman chairs of the klismos type, with curved legs and backrest, appeared. French chairs of the Empire period, executed in dark mahogany and embellished with ornate bronze mounts, created a ponderous effect.
In cheaper products of inferior workmanship, bourgeois chairs of the 19th century carried on the traditions of the 17th and 18th centuries. The only real innovations were the bentwood (wood that has been bent and shaped) chairs in beech that became popular all over the world and were still made in the 20th century. Around 1900 the continental Art Nouveau and Jugendstil styles (French and German styles characterized by organic foliate forms, sinuous lines, and non-geometric forms), and the Arts and Crafts movement in England (established by the English poet and decorator William Morris to reintroduce idealized standards of medieval craftsmanship), gave rise to original chair designs by Eugène Gaillard in France, Henry van de Velde in Belgium, Josef Hoffman in Austria, Antonio Gaudí in Spain, and Charles Rennie Mackintosh in Scotland. These new furniture styles did not exercise wide, let alone decisive, influence. The Art Nouveau chairs designed by the French architect Hector Guimard, for example, are collector’s pieces, but his name is known to a broader public only because of his fanciful entrances to the Paris Métro.
Modern
After World War I, the Bauhaus school in Germany became a creative centre for revolutionary thinking, resulting, for example, in tubular steel chairs designed by the architects Marcel Breuer, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and others. During World War II, the aircraft industry accelerated the development of laminated wood and molded plastic furniture. The dominant chair forms of this period go back to designs by Alvar Aalto, Bruno Mathsson, and Charles and Ray Eames. Rapid technical developments, in conjunction with an ever-increasing interest in human-factors engineering, or ergonomics, purport that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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